Escape the Map

There's always been something slightly sinister to Google Street View and it isn't just the surveillance aspect. Perhaps it is the perpetually sunny sky (Street View vehicles cannot operate in the rain) or maybe the navigation commands that never quite feel intuitive. Google Street View makes no effort to replicate the motion of how we typically experience the city — on foot or by car. A mouse click to the arrows on the ground jerks you forward at a distance far longer than the average stride. With a gravity of its own, impossible weather, and a population of spectral faceless beings — blurred to protect their identities — it is not a world anyone would ever like to live inside.

Maybe your image exists in Google Street View already: blurred and frozen in time. "We call them echoes," says the mysterious woman in Escape the Map, the interactive video produced by Mercedes-Benz. She warns that "time works differently here" — you might find an image of yourself from four days or four years ago… but "relax."

In the film, you are navigating a vehicle through a representation of Hong Kong on Google Street View. The woman — Marie — has just removed a mask that disguised her to look like the other blurry-face people outside. Now she sits in the passenger seat, offering instructions to "escape the map." You risk getting captured by the camera, which will turn you into one of the hopeless blurred people on the streets — faceless and trapped in motion like the victims of Pompeii. Google Street View is never named, but director Carl Erik Rinsch (soon to make his feature film debut with 47 Ronin) exploits all its familiar quirks. A character appears badly rendered and you instructed to "put him together" to advance. Giant red pins that look like Google Map markers come crashing from the sky.

Google Street View could be a geospatial corollary to the Uncanny Valley hypothesis (which suggests that as artificial life grows more lifelike, it also seems eerier, more "uncanny"). In the Mercedes-Benz making-of video, the team explains how they mimicked Street View's aggressive navigation and used green screens to replicate its world. Interestingly, they point out the final touch was to "recreate the harsh midday light of the application." How ironic that advanced technology was employed to create the appearance of sunshine in Google Street View. It is unreality presented on a computer screen as the world outside our window.